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Dual Consciousness by Amy Elizabeth Robinson This Article Helps Students Understand the Cultural and Psychological Effects of Racism and Colonialism Dual Consciousness By Amy Elizabeth Robinson This article helps students understand the cultural and psychological effects of racism and colonialism. It places W.E.B. DuBois’s work, including his idea of “double consciousness,” in the context of transnational connections between colonized peoples. 970L Dual Consciousness Amy Elizabeth Robinson Imperialism is when a less powerful region or group is controlled politically and economically by a powerful nation. Sometimes imperialism involves colonization: the settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people. Sometimes it does not. Regardless, the effects of imperialism and colonialism are not just political and economic. Peoples drawn into wide trade networks or occupied by a colonizing power also experience cultural, emotional, and psychological consequences. Industrial imperialism increased over the course of the nineteenth century. Soon it relied more on the belief system of scientific racism. In other words, many people, including scientists, wrongly believed that people of color were inferior because of their biology. Soon leading thinkers of color began to talk about these arguably deeper effects of imperial power. They especially discussed it as they related to race and racism. One of these intellectuals was W.E.B. DuBois, an African-American scholar. Another was Frantz Fanon, a psychologist from the colony of French Martinique in the Caribbean. Fanon became involved in the Algerian War for Independence. W.E.B. DuBois, Racism, and Double Consciousness W.E.B. DuBois was a sociologist, historian, and author. He was born in Massachusetts in 1868. The U.S. Civil War had just ended. He helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He worked and traveled in both the United States and Europe, and died in Ghana in 1963. In 1905 DuBois published a book, The Souls of Black Folk. It had a lasting effect on how people across the world think about the effects of racism. In the introduction to the book, he wrote that he hoped to outline “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive.” Black Americans, he said, had a “double consciousness.”1 Many of them still remembered the experience of enslavement. He sometimes illustrated this concept using the metaphor of a “veil.” This veil divided the world of black Americans from that of white Americans. On one side of the veil (curtain), among themselves, people of color felt comfortable being themselves: dreaming dreams, making music, expressing their full humanity. But on the other side of the veil, confronted with racism, they lived with a strange “wrenching of the soul” and “sense of doubt” and confusion. The long passage below further explains his idea of double consciousness. (In the passage, DuBois uses W.E.B. DuBois, 1904. By James E. Purdy, public domain. terms for “racial” or historical groups that were common at the time he wrote. For example, “Egyptian” instead of “Arab,” and “Teuton” instead of “northern European.” He also used “Mongolian” instead of “Asian,” and “Negro” instead of “African” or “black.”) 1 Double or dual consciousness refers to feeling as though you have two identities housed in one person or mind. It’s as if you view yourself one way and then others view you a different way or see you through a different lens. 2 Dual Consciousness Amy Elizabeth Robinson “After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,” DuBois said. This world “yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…in one dark body” whose persistent “strength alone keeps it from being torn” apart. DuBois discussed in depth how racism affects the mind. He also discussed political issues. He argued against the work of another leading black intellectual, Booker T. Washington. Washington stressed job training and “racial uplift.” However, Washington refused to engage in struggles for civil and political rights. DuBois admitted that Washington’s approach was popular in the American South. The area was quickly becoming industrial, with business booming. But for DuBois, this wasn’t true freedom, and it wasn’t enough. DuBois developed a sense that the “whole story” of a society or culture could not be told if any part of it was left out. Black Americans, he said, were “gifted with second sight” because of their dual consciousness. So, they had much to teach white Americans and the world. He also wrote about the way in which other stories were excluded from history. For example, he openly talked about how black women were left out of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women’s movement. At that time, speaking out about this topic was unusual. DuBois was friends with Anna Julia Cooper. She was a leading black woman intellectual who wrote A Voice from the South in 1892. She might have influenced his attention to black women’s experience. DuBois set out to show the particular spiritual life of black Americans in a racist political and economic system. Similarly, Cooper set out to present “an intelligent and sympathetic” understanding “of the interests and special needs of the Negro.” But, unlike DuBois in Souls of Black Folk, she included “the real and special influence of woman.” “’Tis woman’s strongest vindication [defense] for speaking,” she wrote, “that the world needs to hear her voice.” In 1896 Cooper helped to found the National Association of Colored Women. Its motto was “Lift as we climb.” This combined the uplift of Washington with the activism of DuBois. Anna Julia Cooper, 1892. Photograph from her book A Voice from the South. Public domain. 3 Dual Consciousness Amy Elizabeth Robinson Colonialism, Culture, and Dual Consciousness In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois wrote famously that “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” He explained this as “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Indeed, by the early twentieth century, people of color around the world were thinking internationally. They connected their struggles and their work. DuBois attended the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900. It attracted participants from Africa, the West Indies, the U.S., and Britain. One attendee was Dadabhai Naoroji. He was the only British Indian member of Parliament and one of the founders of the Indian National Congress. Attendees at the Pan-African Congress meeting in Paris, 1919. Photograph originally printed in “Crisis, A Record of the Darker Races” (Volume 18, no. 1, May 1919). Public domain. Many Pan-African Congress participants focused on political and economic rights. However, they also explored the effects of racism and colonialism on culture and psychology. Indian nationalists, for example, were very interested in focusing on local languages and traditions. In the 1830s the British in India had established a system of education that required instruction in English alone. Indian scholars such as Rabindranath Tagore insisted this was part of the damage of colonialism. “To break the lamp of any people is to deprive it of its rightful place in the world festival,” Tagore said in a 1919 speech. “He who has no light is unfortunate enough, but utterly miserable is he who, having it, has been deprived of it, or has forgotten all about it.” This lamp’s “light” was a nation’s original language and culture. 4 Dual Consciousness Amy Elizabeth Robinson Women of color were also building new global networks. In 1920, black women from the U.S. founded the International Council of Women from the Darker Races. They wanted to learn about and connect directly with women of color who lived under colonialism. The women were descendants of people who were enslaved and treated as commodities.2 They saw similarities between their own experience and that of other colonized peoples. In 1952 Frantz Fanon released a book called Black Skin, White Masks. He again brought up the idea of dual consciousness. Fanon tried “to discover the various mental attitudes the black man adopts in the face of white civilization.” Like DuBois, Fanon recognized that people of color had a divided sense of self. “The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness3 is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking.” The very idea of “blackness,” of being black, Fanon argued, was a product of white minds—a “livery”.4 Fanon’s experiences all contributed to his understanding of race and colonialism. He had lived in French Martinique and was a student in Paris. Fanon was also a doctor in Algeria while the country was trying to gain its independence from France. The French violently attempted to end the Algerian independence movement. Fanon believed the invented categories of race didn’t affect only black-white relationships. They also affected relationships between different “racial” groups worldwide. Dominant groups all over had invented a scale of race, culture, or civilization. Fanon discussed how people of color tried to position themselves in a made-up ranking system.
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